Sunday, March 25, 2012

I’ve mentioned before that I love reading long stories and novellas…
and I still love how the genre gives just enough room for a writer to develop characters
and a complex story but not enough space for aimless wandering. That in mind, here
are two more novellas: their stories are very, very different but I think both
are successful in their own ways. I’ll try to go light on details because I
think short stories, long stories, and novellas are especially prone to
spoilage.

I think it’s a safe bet that Anna Starobinets’s Переходный
возраст(An Awkward Age, translated by Hugh Aplin),
a long story about Max, a maladjusted boy with a twin sister, Vika, and some
bizarre habits, will be most effective among readers with insect phobias. I was
the kid who adored her multi-module Ant Farm, but An Awkward Age contained some ew-inducing
moments for me, too, thanks to several squalid discoveries and Max’s mother’s
rather impassive reactions to her son’s behavior.

Starobinets tells her story in simple language where
repeated motifs help build suspense, and I thought she did nicely combining
nature and city by setting the story amongst the trees and birds of Moscow’s Yasnevo
outskirts. Another plus: she explains the reasons behind Max’s behavior by
having his mother discover his diaries, handily reproduced in the story. I
found some of that section particularly entertaining thanks to young Max’s
phonetic spelling.

Though I didn’t think An
Awkward Age was nearly as good or fun as Starobinets’s Sanctuary 3/9, a later work that’s loaded with fear and
fairy tale themes, I have to give her credit for stringing me along pretty well
with An Awkward Age. I read it very
quickly and not just because of the large print in my book. Starobinets is
often compared to Stephen King, something the Mainer in me can’t quite buy into,
though I have to wonder if Starobinets’s inclusion of a prom-like senior dance
is intended to remind readers of King’s Carrie.

Irina Bogatyreva’s Товарищ Анна(Comrade Anna), a finalist for this year’s
Belkin Prize and nominee for the NatsBest, is a slower-paced, far more rewarding (and difficult to write about!) long story, about the
relationship—it’s more than just young love because of how the story’s written—between
Anna, a Muscovite who takes retro to extremes with her political activity, and
Valka, an easy-going guy from Ulyanovsk who falls for Anna. I think what I
appreciate most about Comrade Anna is
Bogatyreva’s ability to contrast the lives of Anna and Valka: Anna, for
example, lives with a politically liberal grandmother who
disagrees with her granddaughter’s views and seems to be verging on dementia, and Valka lives on the eleventh floor
of a dorm with a roommate, the roommate’s girlfriend, and a cat. Plus a model
of the solar system for perspective.

What’s most intriguing is that Valka’s atmosphere is freer and
more “collective” than Anna’s; Anna is a member of a cell-like political
organization that aims to recreate the allegedly good old days of revolution. Members
even dress in costume for new year’s eve. By contrast, Valka’s dormmates (re)tell
his story in the first person singular, observing Valka’s behavior and sliding in and out of a close
third-person narrative. Still, they speak in a unified
voice that’s far more cohesive and human than what we get from Anna’s group, where
members disagree on how and how much to act. Their language is tragicomically stagnant,
too, because it’s filled with Soviet-era phrases.

Though I never quite grasped why Valka fell so hard for Anna—from
a distance, in the Metro—that he felt compelled to follow her and introduce
himself, I realized that didn’t matter much. For one thing, Bogatyreva filters Valka’s
story through his dormmates, who can’t know everything. For another, the attraction
fits with the novella’s appealingly appropriate combination of reality and irreality.
Another example: Bogatyreva includes a tangent at the start of Comrade Anna that presents a dormmate
obsessed with Mikhail Vrubel’s “Swan Princess” painting. He dies and
Valka takes his place on the eleventh floor. Bogatyreva returns to the Swan
Princess at the end of the story in a way that puzzled me a bit until I read Marta Antonicheva’s
review in the journal Октябрь: to paraphrase, Antonicheva
thinks the Swan Princess helps establish Valka’s transition back to real life
after the costumes and falsity of Anna’s circle. Which makes complete sense to
me, given the fairy tales they want to believe in.

Disclosures: I’ve
met and chatted with Irina Bogatyreva a couple of times; she was kind enough to
give me the text of Comrade Anna.

Up Next: I swear
I will finish the translation list soon! Plus two more novellas/short novels: Viktor
Pelevin’s Omon Ra and Igor
Sakhnovskii’s Насущные нужды умерших (The Vital Needs of the Dead).